Brigade

Brigading is coordinated voting or commenting on a Reddit thread by users organized from another subreddit, social platform, or external group. Reddit's site-wide rules explicitly prohibit it because it short-circuits the upvote-based ranking system that the rest of the platform depends on.

A classic brigade looks like: a thread in one subreddit gets linked from a Discord server, a tweet, or a rival subreddit with a call to downvote (or upvote). Suddenly the thread sees a spike of votes and comments from accounts that don't normally participate in that subreddit. Mods and Reddit's anti-abuse systems watch for these patterns and respond with vote nullification, comment removal, or account actions.

For marketers, brigading is the line you don't want to be near. Asking your team or your Twitter followers to "go upvote my Reddit post" is brigading, even if everyone votes honestly. The same is true of buying upvotes from a service. Reddit detects these patterns through voting graph analysis, IP overlap, and timing signals, and the consequences range from your post being de-ranked to your account and brand being banned sitewide.

Indirect brigading happens when high-traffic subs link to small-sub content. r/SubredditDrama and r/bestof both have explicit no-participation (NP) link norms precisely to avoid sending a wave of strangers into another community's argument. Many subs apply np.reddit.com links automatically.

The legitimate alternative is to make content that's genuinely interesting to a subreddit's actual subscribers and let upvotes happen organically. If you want amplification, post in subs whose members already care about the topic, not subs where you have to import an audience.